Summary

Check out the power adapter on the iPad. I know most people are oooing and ahhhing over the LED display, the light weight, iBook reader and the ability to run pretty much all of 140,000 iPhone Apps. Big deal. So I can read my books, do most of my work, listen to my music, watch TV, movies, facebook, email, chat, msn, write documents, do spreadsheets, surf the web and from anywhere with wi-fi/G3. Nothing new with all those features. Back to the power adapter.

Detail

Check out the power adapter on the iPad. I know most people are oooing and ahhhing over the LED display, the light weight, iBook reader and the ability to run pretty much all of 140,000 iPhone Apps. Big deal. So I can read my books, do most of my work, listen to my music, watch TV, movies, facebook, email, chat, msn, write documents, do spreadsheets, surf the web and from anywhere with wi-fi/G3. Nothing new with all those features. Back to the power adapter. It says 10 W, just 10W (watts) to charge this baby up and it'll go for 10 hours. What does that mean. Well to give you something to compare it with the MacBook Air has a 45W power adapter or a MacBook Pro at least 60W. Bottom line is that this new mobile computer is an order of magnitude more efficient than anything before it.

For me this is where it gets interesting. A year or two ago I designed what may have been the worlds first solar powered desk. That solar desk was powered by a 15W solar panel combined with a single deep cycle battery. It looked good and worked well except for one thing. Running my MacBook Pro computer on it allowed me only about four hours of work time before the power ran out. That 15W solar panel just couldn't keep up with the consumption and my limit to one deep cycle battery meant that the storage was insufficient for when I worked from home.

Apple iPad suddenly changes everything. Now my solar desk will provide more than enough energy throughout the day and with a 10 hour battery operating capability, things will work fine at night and during the cold dull days of January. Of course this all depends on the majority of us doing a couple things. First, we all need to buy or make my solar desk. Second, we'll have to resist the temptation or shall we say legacy of powering up our laptop computers and simply using a little more power than we do already. If we could manage to do these two things, and I think in the long term we will, then this new mobile computer may just be the greenest in the world. Well done Apple from the Natural Life outskirts of cyberspace.